Broward schools bungled bus ridership figures, audits show

State penalized district for inflated numbers

September 25, 2012|By Megan O'Matz, Sun Sentinel

Broward Schools repeatedly submitted error-ridden reports to the state on school bus service in recent years, inflating the number of riders by thousands and resulting in penalties of more than three-quarters of a million dollars, audits obtained by the Sun Sentinel show.

The findings point to the district's long-standing trouble in tracking key operational aspects of its Transportation Services department, which has been under fire for its botched performance in the opening weeks of the 2012-13 school year. Buses showed up late or not at all, stranding students and outraging parents.

Schools Superintendent Robert Runcie said in an interview Tuesday that the current crisis seems to have ebbed. The district now has more drivers than routes and parent complaints have subsided, reduced mostly to routine requests for such things as changes in bus stops, he said.

Administrators blamed the fiasco on numerous last-minute route changes, a shortage of drivers and increased ridership. But community leaders inside and outside the district questioned those explanations, saying the claims of higher bus ridership, for example, are illogical in the face of plunging enrollment.

"I'm not able to get accurate numbers," School Board member Robin Bartleman said in an interview last week. "I don't even know how many students don't have buses."

The 2009 and 2010 audits of Broward school bus service conducted by the Florida Auditor General show the district has been unable for years to accurately state how many children it's picking up and dropping off each day.

"It is really hard to get good data out of Transportation and in many other areas of our business," Runcie said. "The kind of systems and infrastructure required to have data with integrity, that you can count on, they just don't exist."

The number of children being bused is important because like all Florida school districts, Broward receives state funding based on how many children it transports. The more students, the more money it gets. Some children, such as those that are disabled and require specialized service, qualify for higher dollar amounts.

The district reports the total ridership to the state several times a year. The numbers are arrived at through head counts taken by bus drivers and matched with school rosters during survey periods of a week or so.

The Florida Auditor General periodically reviews the submissions.

For the fiscal year ending June 2010, state auditors found Broward overestimated the number of riders by as much as 4,085 – enough children to fill 63 buses. Total peak ridership that year was about 80,000.

About 850 students the district reported riding the bus weren't even enrolled in school, and more than 2,200 others were being bused even though they didn't qualify because they lived less than two miles from school, the auditors found. The district claimed those students couldn't walk to school because of some hazard in their path, such as a busy road, but the dangers were not properly registered with the state as required by law.

In addition, auditors found that documents authorizing 745 students to use public transit at taxpayer expense to attend charter high schools were missing; dozens of students didn't have the disabling medical condition claimed by the district that entitled the school system to higher reimbursements for busing them; and the district couldn't prove that more than 100 students were regularly bused at additional cost between schools and various specialized learning centers, such as ones for at-risk youth or teen parents.

The audit came on the heels of a less extensive review the previous year, 2009, which discovered that the district was not justified in claiming one-quarter of the 748 riders included in the sample.

Auditors found no evidence of fraud in either year.

Runcie, too, dismissed the notion that the district intentionally inflated the number of riders to claim more state funds.

"No, I just think we have bad data," he said.

Even if innocent, the errors will have consequences. The state Department of Education will penalize the district by deducting $745,767 from the $30 million in transportation funding that Broward is supposed to receive this school year, state officials said.

The district was already fined $68,338 in 2011-12 for the errors uncovered in the 2009 audit.

While the reduction in aid this year will hurt, Runcie said the school system must abide by state rules. "Though it's a sizable number, it's something we can work with and try to absorb," he said.

Since he took the helm at the nation's sixth largest school district in October 2011, Runcie said the district has significantly cleaned up its databases and improved its electronic records, by updating street maps, tossing out outdated information, and eliminating duplicate ridership records for students who switch schools.

"We just never took the effort to clean up data until this year and the data cleanup was a big challenge for the system," he said. "But I have heard quite a bit from the new administrators in Transportation that they now believe they have the cleanest data they ever had."

Still, Runcie hopes eventually to outfit district school buses with global positioning systems to better track their whereabouts. And he'd like to deploy other technology that takes daily note of each rider, such as devices that read electronic ID cards.

Until, then, however, challenges remain.

"For example," Runcie said Tuesday, "if you were to ask me like right now did every single kid that was scheduled for this route, did they get on the bus this morning, I don't think we'd be able to tell you that."